Neither Fish Nor Flesh
...The recent ubiquity of mermaids reflects the yearning to celebrate primal female energy in a culture that often denies it There have been a lot of mermaid sightings...
Foodland
...diverse interests in food space, culture, naturally built and virtual landscapes, and environmental issues. Rather than having a website where I write about everything that I find interesting, I force...
Can’t Take a Joke
An interview with Lauren Berlant
Book Review: The Beauty Experiment
...could hope for. There’s plenty of reasons to recommend this book: Baker Hyde’s skilled storytelling, the glimpses into her relationship with her husband and the culture surrounding her (she did...
Not All Nerds
...technical professionals. It’s also during this period that the character type of the “nerd” appeared in popular culture for the first time. The nerd, keyed to facility in math and...
From Gender Critical to QAnon: Anti-Trans Politics and the Laundering of Conspiracy
Stated disavowal of their own bias doesn’t account for how liberals rhetorically shelter political violence
The Whitney Biennial for Angry Women
...the belief in the universal, a pure idea arrived at by a series of white men who have combed through culture and curated its worth. Another face we’ll call visual...
Romancing the Archive
...in Britain’s colonies, composing multi-volume tomes testifying to slave owners’ membership in a political culture based on the timeless rights of Englishmen. Following emancipation in 1838, writers of color would...
The Tryhards
...culture suffering from its fanatical embrace of a terribly misconceived system of personal advancement and power relations. Meritocracy, a kludgy term for a kludgy purpose — defending aristocratic privilege under...
First-Person Deficient
...commodity culture in full flower, a consensus defined by a democracy of material possessions rather than ideas or values. This consensus defines the present moment and weds a postindustrial U.S....
The Birth of a Beauty Criticism
...the time, the only ongoing body of beauty criticism I could find. There were individual essays and reported articles critiquing beauty culture and, of course, books on the matter. But...
Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails
...exploration? How can parents mediate between the famous Mean Girls sex-ed scene (“You will get chlamydia and die”) and the compulsory sexuality of raunch culture? How do you find a...
Cloudy Logic
...Down to Earth, a short book about the “pseudo-rationality” of mid-20th century American culture drawing on his study of “Astrological Forecasts,” the Los Angeles Times’s astrology column. Adorno uses the...
Weight Gains
...culture of laziness and excess à la Wall-E’s floating invalids: claims centered on specifically U.S.-American attitudes to work or disposable income level must be chucked. So what has caused this...
Bloodless Coop
...of the erotic, naturalness, stereotypical femininity, and the earth, and also serves, according to the classic structuralist argument, as an oppositional coding that reinforces normative categories of culture, masculinity, and...
Folk Etymologies
If language is the problem, it isn't always the solution.